Naming characters with Google AdWords

Here’s a new trick.

In this book, I’m try­ing to craft a cen­tral char­ac­ter with some of that same iconic strange­ness that makes Sher­lock Holmes so appeal­ing. There’s a lot that goes into that, but for now, focus on the name. Sher­lock Holmes. It leaves an indeli­ble mark on the brain.

So, I have a name in mind for this char­ac­ter, and I was look­ing for a mean­ing­ful way to test it out—without giv­ing it away.

That’s where AdWords comes in.


Here’s what I did:

Cre­ated a cam­paign attached to a bun­dle of search terms: mys­tery, detec­tive story, sher­lock holmes, noir, and more like those.

Came up with a whole set of names, basi­cally wide vari­a­tions on a theme. One was my orig­i­nal pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I cre­ated an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a dif­fer­ent name swapped in for the headline.

Allo­cated a small bud­get ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the cam­paign. And wow there are a lot of peo­ple search­ing for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.

So the question—and I do think it’s a seri­ous ques­tion, inso­far as it’s a sim­u­la­tion of a deci­sion that will con­front many poten­tial buy­ers of this book—the ques­tion is, which name worked?

The results, pix­e­lated for secrecy’s sake:

Here’s the way I read this: The four names at the top all did about the same. I wouldn’t choose a name with an 0.23% click-​​through rate over a name with an 0.20% just because of that measly 0.03 margin.

But the 0.07% at the bot­tom? I think there’s real sig­nal there. As it hap­pens, the name at 0.07% was one I really liked—but it didn’t make the cut. Alas.

My orig­i­nal idea—the name I came into the exer­cise with—is the one at 0.21%. So basi­cally, I see this as val­i­da­tion: The name works. Peo­ple don’t see it and go “ew” or “meh.”

But okay, I’ll be hon­est. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can pro­vide their own intrin­sic rewards. There’s an aspect of explo­ration to it, too: you’re press­ing out into new tool-​​territory, learn­ing about what you can and can’t do.

This lit­tle AdWords test is a first step. Mechan­i­cal Turk might be next. I mean, imagine—this is the sci-​​fi extrapolation—imagine high­light­ing a block of text, choos­ing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a lit­tle timer appears next to it. Five min­utes later, ding—the timer goes off and you have the results right there, float­ing over the text. Aggre­gated feed­back from an anony­mous swarm of read­ers: “I stum­bled here,” “this vari­a­tion works bet­ter,” “this line rings false.”

That might sound naive—it’s def­i­nitely oversimplified—but I think there might be some­thing use­ful lurk­ing in this par­tic­u­lar tool-​​territory.

Okay so, finally, here’s the irony: I’m mak­ing a big deal out of keep­ing this name secret. Func­tion­ally, it is secret—none of you know what it is yet! And yet… 100,000 peo­ple out there have laid eyes on it. Thou­sands of Google searchers have seen her name. What kind of secret is that?

Ah, liq­uid­ity. Ah, scale.

Some­times, the vast sea of clicks can be a comfort.

(Cross-​​posted to Kick­starter.)

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